“I then had the biggest development in smart-gun technology coming together at my facility in Utah — the Intelligun” says W. P. Gentry, president of Kodiak Arms. The Intelligun uses scanners on a pistol’s grips. If a person’s biometrics — essentially, the patterns of his fingerprints — have been added to the gun’s software, the pistol will activate within one second of being touched.

“This interested Eric Holder,” Gentry says. “He wondered how we might be able to control who was or wasn’t authorized. I stopped him right there. I looked right across a table at Eric Holder — yeah, the attorney general of the United States — and told him, ‘If you try to mandate my smart-gun technology, I’ll burn it down.’ The Intelligun is designed to save lives, not restrict freedom.”…

The idea that the federal or a state government could make this technology mandatory is what has a lot of gun owners — however unfairly — voicing opposition to companies like Armatix and the stores that sell smart guns. They’re concerned for good reason. A 2002 New Jersey law states that when there is a proven smart-gun on the U.S. market — the New Jersey attorney general must decide when this is the case — then within three years, all new handguns sold in New Jersey must incorporate this (likely patented) technology. Meanwhile, many anti-gun groups are publicly salivating over what such restrictions could do to the gun market.